Michelle Tea—poet, novelist, memoirist, and scrappy queer icon—has a new memoir! It's called How To Grow Up and is written as a series of interconnected essays that chronicle Tea's long, meandering path towards something like Read Adulthood.

Tea is the much-celebrated author of such classics as The Chelsea Whistle, Valencia, Rent Girl, and The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, as well as the founder of seminal queer literary tour Sister Spit. In this new memoir, she may have traded her by-the-seat-of-her-pants punk life for a more "normal" day-to-day, but don't worry—the messy, funny, wholly relatable Michelle Tea hasn't gone anywhere! She's just exploring new ways of doing things now that she is in her 40s, married to her wife Dashiell, and a new parent.

How To Grow Up is darkly funny, poignant, and inspiring without veering into cheesy self-help territory. Tea shares advice and insights
about relationships, breakups, money, the merits of taking the long and winding
path to adulthood, and feminism. “When feminism felt like it was bumming out my
reality, it was time to redefine what a feminist was,” she writes in the
chapter “I’m So Vain.” Similar to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, How To Grow Up
embraces contradictions: You can obsess over wrinkle creams and cry at the
sight of a beautiful purse and still be a feminist, obviously. Sometimes you
just have to grow up a little bit to realize that fact.—Dina Gachman at Bustle